Mark Kidel

Mark Kidel (born 6 July 1947) is a documentary filmmaker, writer and critic, working mostly in France and the UK. His award-winning films include portraits of Cary Grant, John Adams, Elvis Costello, Boy George, Ravi Shankar, Rod Stewart, Bill Viola, Iannis Xenakis, pianists Alfred Brendel and Leon Fleisher, Derek Jarman, Brian Clarke Balthus, Tricky, Robert Wyatt and American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars.

A pioneer of the "rockumentary", Kidel was also the first rock critic of the New Statesman and contributed pieces on rock, soul, and world music, to The Observer, The Sunday Times, and The Guardian.

Early life Kidel grew up in Paris and Vienna

Kidel invited James Hillman to Dartington Hall in 1984 to run a weekend seminar on animals in myths, dreams and fairy tales. Following this they collaborated, with Susan Rowe-Leete, on seven films based on Hillman's ideas: The Heart Has Reasons: a film about the way in which the heart is imagined by scientists and poets Kind of Blue: an essay in defence of melancholia The Architecture of the Imagination: a series of five ground-breaking films, 30-minutes each, about architecture and symbolism, with ones about the doorway, the staircase, the window, the tower and the bridge. The films included many examples drawn from the history of art and classic cinema.

Music criticism From 1972 to 1976, Kidel wrote music reviews for Time Out's music section.

During his time in Devon and onwards, Kidel produced more writing on contemporary music, specifically rock, folk, soul, R&B, blues, and world music, contributing pieces to The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Guardian and the New Review. He was the founding rock columnist for the New Statesman in 1976 through 1980 and alternated every other week with John Peel on a regular column in The Listener.

WOMAD Kidel and Peter Gabriel, with whom he had become friends after interviewing him for The Observer, discovered they were both interested in exploring music from other cultures. This led to a collaboration on the creation of a world music and rock festival that eventually became WOMAD. Kidel fed ideas which came from looking at successful world music festivals in France, the yearly event in Rennes, run by Chérif Khaznadar and Françoise Gründ. Kidel was on the first board of directors but resigned owing to other commitments. A group that included Jonathan Arthur, Thomas Brooman, Martin Elbourne, Bob Hooton, and Steve Pritchard eventually brought the festival to fruition in 1982.

Return to television In 1987, Kidel returned to television: That year, he worked as joint commissioning editor-in-chief for the inaugural broadcast of the French cultural channel La Sept – later known as ARTE France. He also worked as a consultant to Channel 4, BBC Wales, and United Television, a large UK-based independent producer of TV programmes, through 2004. Kidel also produced and directed many films from 1987 until the present, working in collaboration with a number of production companies, in the UK – Dibb Directions, Third Eye and Antelope Films – in France with Les Films d'ici, and Agat Films & Cie – Ex Nihilo and also a regular guest producer with the BBC's Music and Arts Department.

One notable project involved collaborating with British producer and director Mike Dibb and the world-renowned American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax – creating two films for Channel 4 out of 500 or so hours of material he had shot in the United States over a 10-year period: American Patchwork and Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old.

Many of Kidel's most successful films in the field of world music and cultures have been the result of collaborations with distinguished specialists: Le Paris Black and Pygmies in Paris with French music writer (and ex-editor of Jazz Magazine) Gérald Arnaud, Under African Skies: Mali and Bamako Beat with ethnomusicologist and BBC broadcaster Lucy Durán , and New York:, The Secret African City with the Yale Africanist Robert Farris Thompson.

Move to role as self-shooting director A major shift occurred in Kidel's work starting in 1997: he started shooting his own films. The intimacy achieved in "Naked and Famous", his film about Tricky, owed a great deal to this new low-impact approach. Subsequently, Kidel shot many of his own films or the parts of them using this approach.

Current work Kidel founded the production company Calliope Media in 2003. Calliope Media was renamed Mark Kidel Films in 2022. He continues to work as a freelance director, mainly in the UK and France. Recent films include Becoming Cary Grant (2017), an official selection at the 2017 Cannes Festival, The Juilliard Experiment (2016), a feature-length film about the French artist Fabienne Verdier's collaborations with musicians in New York. Current projects include a feature documentary about Leonard Cohen, co-written with Sylvie Simmons, author of the acclaimed biography and 'I'm You Man, a film about the French pianist Shani Diluka as well as other music and arts projects. He is an active freelance writer, notably writing for Dasha Zhukova's art magazine Garage and Doris Lippitsch's architecture and design magazine QUER. He is a regular contributor on music, film and theatre for The Arts Desk, an online review of the arts founded in September 2009 by a group of freelance arts writers.

Selected awards Grierson Award for the Best History Documentary, 2007, for Hungary 1956: Our Revolution FIPA D'Argent Special Prize, Biarritz, 2002, for Ravi Shankar: Between Two Worlds Grand Prix, Classiques en Images festival, Paris, 2002, for Leon Fleisher: Lessons of a Master Royal Television Society Award, 1995, for Kind of Blue Liliane Stewart Prize for Design Arts, Festival International du Film Sur L'art, Montreal, 2011, for the documentary "Colouring Light: Brian Clarke – An Artist Apart"

Personal life Kidel has been married twice. His first marriage was to Caroline Wyndham, who had a daughter Sarah, whom Kidel adopted. The couple subsequently had Leo and Chloe. His second marriage was to Susan Rowe-Leete, from whom he was divorced in 2018. They have two children, Sam and Anna.

Filmography 75 min and over The Man They Couldn't Hang: Babbacombe Lee, 1974, 90 min So You Wanna Be A Rock'n'Roll Star (The Kursaal Flyers), 1975, 90 min Rod the Mod Has Come of Age (Rod Stewart), 1976, 90 min – Telluride Film Festival selection, 2001; FIPA D'Argent Special Prize; Grand Prix du Documentaire, UNESCO Festival International du Film d'Art; World Culture Forum Vienna TV Award; Newport International Film Festival; San Francisco International Film Festival, all 2002 Glastonbury, 2002, 2 hrs Paris Brothel, 2003, 75 min – Best Arts Documentary nomination, Grierson Awards, 2007 Journey With Peter Sellars, 2007, 90 min – Telluride Film Festival selection, 2007; San Francisco International Film Festival selection, 2008; Golden Prague nomination, 2008 Set the Piano Stool on Fire, 2010, 77 min Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance, 2013, 90 min The Juilliard Experiment, 2016, 90 min Fabienne Verdier: Painting the Moment, 2013 Road Movie: A Portrait of John Adams, 2013 – Selection at FIFA (Montreal), 2013 and Telluride Film Festival, 2013 Martin Amis's England, 2014

50 and 52 min Sounds Off the Beaten Track: WOMAD, 1987, 52 min Bamako Beat: Music From Mali, 1991, 50 min The Heart Has Reasons, 1993, 52 min

Books Dartington (Webb & Bower, Exeter, 1983) Learning by Doing (Green Books, Hartland)

Co-authored with Susan Rowe-Leete The Meaning of Illness (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1986)